I have an advantage over my former self this time around: I've potentially been drugged to productivity. The doctor's prescribed Wellbutrin, which is great stuff if you can avoid the lovely side effects such as seizures and hallucinations. I think it's done a little to settle my confidence undermining cognitive dissonance, something I've a habit of savoring a bit overmuch in my extended free time.

June 1st isn't very far from now, and I've lost a few days to not being aware the competition had begun, what with my latest existential crisis about having put myself on antidepressants for the first time in my life. God, I'm fucking emo sometimes. However, I don't anticipate needing more than a three weeks, provided I don't get sidetracked with shit. (My sister's visiting for a baby shower this weekend, for example - I'll probably end up having to watch the nephew, blargh.)

Bad news: I just discovered that my old backups were not as complete as I thought, so I didn't have the code I thought I did. I'm going to have to rethink this, because starting from scratch doesn't quite ring "get something done" as truly.

Randomly generated maps. I've already got some of the code for that too and have pretty much figured out the design metholodogy that involves building on templates.

Persistent state assets between maps. In other words, your squaddies gain experience, you have equipment, ect.

Multiplayer may or may not be a part of my GSDC'11 game. I love persistent-state multiplayer, it's a large part of the reason why I'm so fixated on BYOND as a platform, but it adds a whole lot more overhead managing the transition of the player to and from the game.

The main challenges I can foresee undergoing will involve:

I will need to refamiliarize myself with BYOND. I haven't been coding hard in months.

I will need to modify my existing code to suit the new project needs.

I'll need to create a lot of new code and assets to bridge the gap the rest of the way.

I will need to finalize the game into a "finished" state, which I've been notoriously bad at, and upon successful completion will likely freeze over Hell briefly.

I made two mistakes. The first was backing up to an internal drive folder thinking it was an external drive folder. The second was not including the BYOND folder in my Windows Backup routine.

All that lovely code I worked on to spawn whole universes? Gonesville.

Gone also is the aforementioned squad visibility code and map templating code.

Oh well. A veteran computer user not only has a regular habit of making backups, but also a great propensity to coping with data loss. Fact of the matter is, coding isn't the hard part, the hard part is coming up with the design. I've already got the design in my head for those mechanics, so I can recode it any time I want.

Good news is, I did keep everything made up until the end of last year, so I've plenty of my old code to play with to refamiliarize myself with BYOND.

Yeah, if I run into any seizures then this will not be something I'm supposed to take anymore. Nor something I'd be particularly interested in in taking. As the odds of seizure are dose dependent, suffice to say, I'm being *very* careful not to overdose.

So far it's done nothing but perhaps even me out and make me a little more optimistic. I think I've become accustomed to the half-dosage. My dosage goes up to the full dosage on Tuesday.

And you should de-strike the "Alright, enough yacking about it, time to get to work." part of your post. It's still relevant.